April 10, 2011

Differentiation

Currently Listening To: a preview of Lenka's new CD on itunes! (If you've never heard of Lenka, startwiththese. They're my faves.) (p.s. I saw her in concert my first year of college, before I'd actually ever heard of her. It cost $3. I'm pretty sure she's charging more than that now...)

Differentiation is one of our buzz words in the Ed School. (along with other words like “scaffolding” and “Bloom’s Taxonomy”) It essentially means knowing all your students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and being able to tailor your lesson plan to meet all of them. It’s what, as a teacher, you should be striving for.

Right now, I’m working on an assignment dealing with all of this – taking a lesson plan, creating ‘student profiles’ for three made up students with individualized needs (por ejemplo, one of mine is an English language learner, one is below grade level in reading, etc.) and then marking how you would change (excuse me, differentiate) the lesson plan to meet all these needs.

But the ‘student profile’ is made up of things like multiple intelligences (based on Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences) and learning styles and all that, and before I knew that(/while I was tring to figure out what 'student profile' means and googling things like “differentiating instruction student profile example”), I of course came across all these tests to discover what intelligence I have and what’s my learning style and just personality tests in general.

So of course I took them.

And although maybe I wasn’t quite so efficient in getting my work done, I really feel like I've searched my soul and learned a lot about myself tonight:

Intelligences: Language (linguistic), followed by social (interpersonal) and body movement (kinesthetic)

[the musings of me]

raised in africa, now back in america, but still looking to the world. working on loving jesus back because he loved me first. my life is caffeinated college craziness and a lot of awkward moments. i love dance parties, sunshine, pashmina scarves and beautiful words, and i’d much rather be barefoot. welcome to my life.